Services

Monthly sessions held at Mildmay Hospital’s Education department; in these sessions individuals share their knowledge and experiences with each other. Professionals contribute to these sessions providing the latest information on managing conditions.

Home and hospital visits to clients who are housebound or hospitalised, this project is essential as most of our clients are Refugees and live in isolation.

A project developed to support women who receive a positive diagnosis during routine antenatal testing and their partners. The process involves running support groups and providing peer support as and when needed. Members of Rise Community Action who have had positive diagnosis while pregnant but are now empowered provided the peer support. The support group/discussion groups are aimed at better informing both the female and their male partners the benefits of taking early HIV test and interventions to reduce the mother to child HIV transmission. The topics of discussion included:

1. HIV treatment during and after pregnancy
2. Safer sex
3. Disclosure/Relationship
4. Breast feeding

In our first eighteen months over 5000 individuals made use of our services, and we are now trying to build on that phenomenal success by extending the range of services and the quality of those services by further facilitating the rehabilitation of our users. Central to our work in the coming year, will be two new programmes, dedicated to improving the lives of our users.

Beyond displacement is a new concept in health advocacy and personal development training. Beyond Displacement is a collaborative effort to design, develop and implement a comprehensive system of recruiting, screening, educating and counselling to motivate and train individuals in basic survival skills, personal presentation, motivational skills, Internet applications and the latest high technology.
Beyond Displacement utilises the services of physicians, psychologists, human development specialists, and systems engineers who will provide intense training, counselling and mentoring for refugees to increase their chance of being fully integrated in British society. We will provide basic education and job skills training to prepare young adults from the community for jobs in the private, city and public sectors. The Program coordinator will work with agencies that will provide input into recruitment, counselling, and training for participants.

This twenty-week programme will teach young individuals how to take responsibility for their sexual activities. Central to this programme is teaching young women how to take charge of their bodies and what happens to it.
This programme is intended to highlight the inherent dangers of ignorance and avoidance. It tackles many of the myths of the sexual transmission of diseases and reveals the consequences to individuals.
To females this could include:

• Infertility a life without children
• Mis-carriages
• Liver failure
• Blindness
• Death
• Social exclusion

We remain grateful to our funders and we will be seeking in the coming year to address this area even more because as an organisation it is important that the organisation is in position to employ paid staff, to address the urgent issues of our beneficiaries.
Our funders over the past year have been:

• Association of London Government
• City & Hackney Primary Care Trust
• Community Empowerment Network
• Government Office for London
• Hackney Council for Voluntary Services
• Neighbourhood Renewal Fund
• Local Network Fund

We are also fortunate to receive donations from friends and well wishers of Rise Community Action as they try to ensure that the organisation survives. We have been able to generate some funds from the sale of some craft items produced by our users; this is an aspect of our activity we would dearly like to develop.